Here's a dumb little story about things that happen sometimes.

Have you ever fallen in loathe, and then found yourself alone again?

Just after Christmas a man by the name of Lawrence moved into the warehouse where I live. As I type this I can see, through the open doors to my studio, across the little balcony and the ricketty ladder that leads up to my mezzanine garret, across the passage that allows the forklift to reach the back of the place, across the large expanse of bare floor that roofs most of the ground floor storage area, to Lawrences studio. It's empty now. Nothing but fragments of plaster, wax, wire, and a rabbit in a pen.

I remember when he moved in. I took an immediate disliking to him. He was a wiry short forty-something bloke, looked like a desert prospector in washed out blue canvas shirt and shorts. He had a pinched, bitter, suspicious face with little watery eyes which wandered around and didn't actually have any expression in them, because they were too small.

Lawrence was a sculptor who had a dream of building huge forty-foot-high gesticulating human figures out of bronze and sticking them on top of every tall vantage point in Sydney for the Olympics. When he moved in he brought with him boxes of scale models of these hideous stretched sculptures, modelled in wax and then cast in bronze and fixed on wooden plinths. His master plan was this: he would live here, rent free because he was staying on storage floorspace rented by the Envirobooks mail order company but left unused; he would set his sculptures up like a mini art gallery; he would invite as many ministers and politicians and influential people in to view them as he could persuade to come; he would arrange funding to build his huge monstrosities, as tourist attractions for the Olympics; and he would thus stamp his presence all over the city like a mini art Hitler that he was.

The first time I spoke to him, he was in the kitchen cooking one of the only two things he ever ate. Food #1 for him was a cup of soybeans, soaked, then boiled, served on a plate with a side salad of chopped tomatoes and shredded raw garlic. Food #2 was for special occassions only, a kind of cassarole made in a black iron pot. I never found out what went into that, but he used to take the pot off the stove and put it directly into the freezer, melting all the frost on the coils and causing a fetid drizzle to rain down over everything in the fridge below.

As he served his noxious beans and stuff he told all present that a vegetarian diet was best because vegetarian shit doesn't smell. I couldn't believe that an adult human could be so twisted as to decide what to eat simply to reduce the smell of his shit. Anyway, it wasn't true. He used to spray the entire toilet bowl with a thin dark gruel of grey drek and then use the half-flush button "to save water", or maybe so we could all observe his creative output.

He was a human dildo. He was stiff, dead and cold, his head always thrown back, he'd stomp around the place looking for things to complain about, radiating arrogance and contempt for the politicians who refused to sponsor his dream, who couldn't recognise his genius. I made up my mind about him when he announced that he especially wanted to put sculptures on top of the pylons of the Glebe Island Bridge, which is visible from here. I asked him which particular sculptures he wanted to put there, and he got confused. To him, it didn't matter. None of them were designed for any particular location. All he wanted was his work, big, in everyone's faces. At that moment I fell in loathe with him.

My loathe increased when he started washing his beaten old prospectors costume in the sink and hanging it on a line outside, like a sign saying "Look everyone, someone's living here!" This is an industrial zoned building, no residency. Then he started hosting creative drawing classes. Dozens of smug wealthy art students would come in and seriously draw FULLY CLOTHED models while he criticised and instructed them. Then he'd boil them a pot of meal #2 and they'd occupy the kitchen for 2 hours, staring coldly at anyone else who tried to get to the sink or fridge to rescue their bread from the warm rain of melted frost. He had a tinny clock radio which he tuned to a classical music station and left on all the time. Endless tinkling piano or violin concertos, all day every day. His "friends" were stuffy old women and frail queer "art lovers" who would come around and drink white wine and, I swear, hold little recitals where they would recite classical poetry and sing motets in latin. Then they'd discuss in loud voices how backward Sydney is for not having an official sculpter-in-residence, and how perfect he would be in that position. All the while grooving on the poignant poverty of his current position, as he did his little "starving artist" routine for them.

To show him my loathe I hung an example of MY art work, a huge 9 X 9 foot quilt of a black and white bitmap of a crying childs face, 60 X 60 black and white pixel cotton squares, on the outside of my studio facing his setup. I also started buying fatty lamb chops and grilling them in the kitchen, so he could savour the smell. Also, I'd crank up Fear Factory or Lard whenever he had his classes, and put on my most threatening urban geurilla gear whenever his wanky friends came round, and go out and scowl at them.

When his students started chatting with me, and especially when they befriended my black cat and would come over to pat him, he found a baby rabbit somewhere and set it up in a pen near his studio. It's a stupid little thing, just eats vegetables all day and shits and pisses right where it stands, all over it's food. You can't pat it, if you get to near it bolts and runs for cover where it crouches shivering for an hour. I reckon he was hoping the cat would eat it so he could complain, but Mozart's pretty cluey, he'll catch rats and pigeons but I've seen him socialize with a pet rat in a cage, without trying to bite it. If he sees a human feeding an animal he just assumes it's some kind of mutant cat with it's own slaves.

The climax of his stupidity came when he claimed to be part aboriginal. This would have been stupid even if he was, because there's been a few scandals here, such as a white lady painter who maintained a black persona for decades to sell her work, and a writer or two who've been constructing aboriginal identities to get critical acclaim for their novels. He started showing his classes videos about how black children were taken from their parents in the 50s and sent to live with white foster families, and then discussing how being part black is what gives his art it's special depth, and also how this fact is why the fascist bastard art council wouldn't fund him the millions he needed for his dreams to come true.

Then one night three of my friends came over at 2am after closing time, drunk as fuck. I had to let them in - they had booze. They drank in my studio for awhile until we got bored and I had the idea of hanging them on the gravity frame. This is a stretcher with foot restraints that pivots on an axle, so you can strap yourself in, lean back until you're hanging vertically, and, I hoped, puke all over the floor.

None of them puked, all it did was give them (and me) wicked headrushes as the alcohol-enriched blood surged down into the cranium. So, in that state of mind, I suddenly had the brilliant idea of going and looking at the rabbit.

We silently tiptoed our way towards the pen, and were just about to see if we could get little Mopsy to drink a saucer of beer when Lawrence emerged from his spartan cubicle like an rabid bat and started screaming at us. At first we were too shocked to do anything, so we just stood and stared as he screamed and waved his fists in our faces.

It wouldn't have been too much work to pound him down but something was wrong. As he ranted I realised he wasn't actually saying anything like "Go away and let me sleep you bastards", he was just insulting us, calling us drunken worthless louts (true), stupid fuckers (not true), and generally antagonising us. Anyway, we were metres away from his actual studio and we hadn't made that much noise. When I considered the consequences of hitting him, I realised it would involve him getting lots of sympathy from his friends, maybe coverage in the papers, more publicity (Aboriginal Sculptor Beaten In His Studio by White Gang) and so on. So, I started pushing my friends, still stupified by his performance, back to my studio, while he followed and tried to drag them back. We made it and I locked the door and explained the situation to them while he stood outside and continued screaming. They may have been drunk but they understood the situation, so we waited until he gave up and tiptoed out to find some food.

The next week was great. Every day Lawrence would find some excuse to come and stand at my door and make with the epithets, while I worked and pretended I couldn't hear. I heard him telling his class the epic tale of our encounter, how he frightened us so much with his ferocity that we turned and ran like the racist cowards we were (one of the guys was fullblooded Korean, by the way), and how they shouldn't leave anything valuable lying around because it was obvious we were theives trying to rob him.

Then, our loathe afair ended.

I was working late one night, the building was silent. I could hear Lawrence stomping around, still maintaining the rage. Then, a horrible banging and crunching, silence, and a hideous groan. I went to investigate.

At first I thought he'd fallen down the stairs, but it was better than that. He'd been stomping so badly that he'd dislodged part of the floor. A panel of thick bulletproof perspex from a demolished bank, which was set into the floor to let light into the space beneath, had jumped off a beam and tipped up like a trapdoor to let him fall through. He was lying between rows of bookshelves in Envirobooks storage area on the ground floor with the heavy panel on top of his body.

At first I thought he was dead, but he started to move and pushed the panel off himself. This was promising, and I hoped he was just stunned and I could go back to work, but then I saw his leg. His right shin had been deeply gashed on the metal beam on the way down. It was like a knife cut, like a dissection in biology. I kneeled down for a better look. The sharp edge had sliced to the bone and then pulled the cut open so the layers of meat and gristle were displayed. It was bloodless at first, the same grey and pink of a Christmas ham after a week in the fridge, this effect enhanced by the white length of bone running down the middle. Then the shock faded, the veins unclenched and the rich red korover started to flow.

I calmed him down when he started to thrash around and panic, and told him he was okay except his leg was cut open and it was definitely a stitch job. First step, transport. I can't drive. So I left him and went to call an ambulance. When I returned Lawrence had dragged himself to the Envirobooks phone and was calling someone. I told him the ambulance was coming and he panicked at the thought of paying for that (heh!) and demanded I cancel it. So I did.

Luckily Dave, a musician with a studio here, walked in just then and I told him what had happened. He has a van. So, we picked up the delireous Lawrence and dragged him out to the van. On the way he told us he'd called a doctor friend who lived nearby, so we drove over to the address he gave.

The doctor was actually an accupuncturist, who took one look at Lawrences leg and demanded we take him to hospital. Like, she was going to stick pins in the wound and close it? So, off we went again. Dave had blood all over his shirt by this time, as he was carrying Lawrences leg end, so we looked pretty good as we carried him into the emergency reception of the hospital. At first they thought we'd had a knife fight, until Lawrence admitted he'd fallen down and cut himself.

Next thing we drop Lawrence in the bed they led us to, and start waiting for the doctor. Now Lawrence asks, can we call a friend of his who does Reiki and ask him to beam some warm rays of long-distance healing energy to his leg. This made me really sick - some tired doctor was going to do his best to stitch his worthless leg up, and Lawrence would credit his recovery to a bloody newage faith-healer. Dave made the call and came back, and Lawrence starts feeling better immediately.

We left soon after when the doctor decided to line him up for a leg X-ray to look for fractures. I really wanted to go because Lawrence was actually smiling at me, and I knew then that our loathe was at an end. It was all over. We could never be enemies again.

This was confirmed the next day when he hobbled in and thanked me meekly for my kindness. Apparently he was deeply touched by the fact I hadn't left him to rot on the floor. I swallowed the bolus of vomit that rose in my throat and said it was nothing. Anyway, Dave was the guy who drove us and got bloodied up and had the carpet in his van stained. But still, he was grateful. I guess, if the tables were turned, he would have laughed and gone out to leave me to die.

Poor Lawrence, now scared of the floor dropping out from under him again, and without the bond of our loathe to hold him, quietly packed up his wretched belongings, crated his statues, scammed a ticket to Paris from someone, and left. Now, it's so quiet. All we have to remember him by is the rabbit, now twice the size it was when he got it. Soon, unless the calicivirus gets it, we'll hold a little dinner party and serve it with soyabeans and tomatoes in memory of this remarkable man whom I shall miss forever.